Three Visitors to Early Plymouth: Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven yearsAltham, Emmanuel
History
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth: Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven years
Altham, Emmanuel
Massachusetts -- History -- New Plymouth, 1620-1691
For this reason they are obliged to watch the season for sowing. At the
end of March they begin to break up the earth with mattocks, which they
buy from us for the skins of beavers or otters, or for sewan. They make
heaps like molehills, each about two and a half feet from the others,
which they sow or plant in April with maize, in each heap five or six
grains; in the middle of May, when the maize is the height of a finger
or more, they plant in each heap three or four Turkish beans, which then
grow up with and against the maize, which serves for props, for the
maize grows on stalks similar to the sugar-cane. It is a grain to which
much labor must be given, with weeding and earthing-up, or it does not
thrive; and to this the women must attend very closely. The men would
not once look to it, for it would compromise their dignity too much,
unless they are very old and cannot follow the chase. Those stalks which
are low and bear no ears, they pluck up in August, and suck out the sap,
which is as sweet as if it were sugar-cane. When they wish to make use
of the grain for bread or porridge, which they call _Sappaen_, they
first boil it and then beat it flat upon a stone; then they put it into
a wooden mortar, which they know how to hollow out by fire, and then
they have a stone pestle, which they know how to make themselves, with
which they pound it small, and sift it through a small basket, which
they understand how to weave of the rushes before mentioned. The finest
meal they mix with lukewarm water, and knead it into dough; then they
make round flat little cakes of it, of the thickness of an inch or a
little more, which they bury in hot ashes, and so bake into bread; and
when these are baked they have some clean fresh water by them in which
they wash them while hot, one after another; and it is good bread, but
heavy. The coarsest meal they boil into a porridge, as is before
mentioned, and it is good eating when there is butter over it, but a
food which is very soon digested. The grain being dried, they put it
into baskets woven of rushes or wild hemp, and bury it in the earth,
where they let it lie, and go with their husbands and children in
October to hunt deer, leaving at home with their maize the old people
who cannot follow. In December they return home, and the flesh which
they have not been able to eat while fresh, they smoke on the way, and
bring it back with them. They come home as fat as moles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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